Minutes:2018 Mar ConfCall

Dial-in information

Agenda

Venue: To be held by conference call on March 16, 2018, 11.00am EDT (15:00 UTC, 16:00 CET, 8.00am PDT). Note that at the time of the meeting, the US will have switched already to DST, whereas Europe will not, so the time zone difference is an hour less than it would normally be.
Dial-in Information: +1-857-216-2939 PIN: 62534 http://www.uberconference.com/hlapp

  1. Old business
  2. New business
    1. Term expirations and Elections for the Board ( electronic ballot)
      • Bastian Greshake Tzovaras, running for Board member at-large
      • Yo Yehudi, running for Board member at-large
    2. Fiscal sponsor - experiences, lessons, possibilities

Minutes

Attending:

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OBF Public Board Meeting to take place March 16, 2018 at 15:00 UTC

The OBF Board of Directors holds a public meeting about once a year, in accordance with our bylaws. The next such meeting will take place on March 16, 2018, at 15:00 UTC (11am EDT / 8am PDT / 16:00 CET). The meeting agenda can be found at /wiki/Minutes:2018_Mar_ConfCall.

At this public Board meeting, we will consider two new candidates running for Board seats: Bastian Greshake Tzovaras and Yo Yehudi. Both are known for their promotional and organizational involvement in open science, open data and open source bioinformatics.

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OBF accepted as a mentoring organisation for Google Summer of Code 2018

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation has been accepted as a mentoring organisation for the 2018 instance of the Google Summer of Code. OBF is acting as an umbrella for ten bioinformatics Open Source projects, making it possible to offer a very diverse set of student projects.

Are you a student and interested in applying for any of the projects? The student application period is open from March 12th through 27th from the official GSoC website. See the full timeline for details. Feel free to contact the mentors of projects you are interested in already, though.

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GCCBOSC 2018: A Bioinformatics Community Conference - Call for Abstracts

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We are pleased to announce that abstract submission and early registration for GCCBOSC2018 are now open. This event brings our annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference and the Galaxy Community Conference together into a unified week-long event. If you work in open source life science or data-intensive biomedical research, then there is no better place than GCCBOSC 2018 to present your work and to learn from others.

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OBF Travel Fellowship - Coding in the Winter Wonderland: Galaxy Admin Training in Oslo, 2018

This blog post is syndicated from a post on Arun Decano’s blog, originally published Feb 1, 2018. Arun was supported by the ongoing OBF travel fellowship program to attend a Galaxy Admin Workshop held in Oslo, Norway Jan 7-14, 2018. The OBF’s Travel Fellowship program continues to help open source bioinformatics software developers with funding to attend conferences, workshops, or training events. The next call closes 15 April 2018. [Read More]

Arun Decano awarded OBF Travel Fellowship

Arun Decano Arun Decano is a PhD research fellow in the Infection Genomics Group at Dublin City University in Dublin, Ireland. Her research, with advisor Dr. Tim Downing, focuses on the phylogenomic study of a multidrug-resistant bacterial population and aims to develop novel infection control strategies using whole genome sequence data.

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation awarded Ms. Decano a travel fellowship to help defray the cost of attending the European Galaxy Administrator Workshop ( https://www.elixir-europe.org/events/european-galaxy-administrator-workshop) in January 2018.

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Mailing list consolidation

The OBF’s self-hosted mailman server is still struggling right now, so we are looking at migrating the active mailing lists to paid hosting, and as part of this consolidating down to ideally about a dozen mailing lists. Currently we have a lot of mailing lists, but many are dormant or redundant. [Read More]

Next OBF Travel Fellowship application deadline is Dec 15!

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation travel fellowship program was launched in 2016 to help increase diverse participation at events promoting open source bioinformatics software development and open science in the biological research community. There are four application deadlines per year; the next will be December 15, 2017. If you are hoping to attend an open source / open science bioinformatics even and travel costs are a barrier, we encourage you to apply for one of our $1000 travel fellowships. More information, including a link to the application form, can be found at https://github.com/OBF/obf-docs/blob/master/Travel_fellowships.md.

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BOSC 2017 in Prague, the land of stories (and beer)

This is a guest blog post from Farah Zaib Khan, who was supported by the ongoing Open Bioinformatics Foundation travel fellowship program to attend our annual conference BOSC 2017 and its preceding Codefest in Prague, July 2017. The OBF’s Travel Fellowship program continues to help open source bioinformatics software developers with funding to attend conferences or workshops. The current call closes 15 December 2017, you might want to apply? [Read More]

OBF visioning 2017

TL;DR: The OBF isn’t doing enough in public policy and advocacy around Open Science, and we are looking to recruit a new board member who is interested in this role. Is that you? If yes, then contact us.


At our October meeting, the OBF board took some time to think broadly about the OBF, current and future. We tried to answer the questions: What do we say we do? What do we actually do? What more do we wish we could do? We re-read our mission statement and list of public activities from the OBF main page, listed the current efforts of the board members and affiliates, and assessed how our actual work aligned with the stated goals of the organization. This was motivated by having board members who are new-ish to the OBF, as well as upcoming board elections.

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